The Lords of Warby Mike Whitney
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 29, 2005

George
Bush . . . “One dead American for every day in office.”

President Bush’s
latest milestone in the war on terror has been predictably ignored in the
mainstream media. Bush, who is now in the fifth year of his presidency,
has served 1,727 days in office. With the death toll in Iraq currently at
1,873 servicemen, Bush can now boast that at least one American has died
for every day he’s been in office, a sobering tribute to a man who wants
to be remembered as “a war president.”

Every day, another
Casey Sheehan or some other faceless patriot dies in Bush’s war of choice.

The tragedy of the
war cannot be fully grasped simply by listing the number of American
casualties on Bush’s watch, but it’s a good place to start.

We should also be
paying careful attention to the deteriorating situation in Iraq, which is
lurching in an even more deadly direction.

The sudden breakdown
in the talks on the proposed constitution is an ominous sign that the
violence in Iraq is likely to escalate dramatically in the coming months.
The Sunnis, who represent 20% of the population and the vast majority of
the Iraqi resistance, have played a minor role in drawing up the
constitution. The Shiites and Kurds have dominated the negotiations and
composed a document that will divide the country into three nearly
autonomous regions, leaving the Sunnis in an area with miniscule oil
resources.

The Shiites have
managed to introduce Islam as the religion of the state and “a primary
source of legislation,” ensuring that it will be an integral part of the
legal system all the way up to the Supreme Court. Americans who may have
thought that we were fighting for democracy in Iraq may want to read
Article 2 of the constitution:

Paragraph 1: …Islam
is the official religion of the state, and is a fundamental source for
legislation. No law may be legislated that contravenes the essential
verities of Islamic Law.

“By specifying
Islamic Law this text enshrines Shariah or Islamic Canon Law quite
explicitly in the constitution and would allow religious jurists to
question secular legislation” (Juan Cole)

Cindy Sheehan has
every right to ask if this is the “noble cause” for which her son died.

In just two years
Bush has managed to achieve bin Laden’s dream of establishing an Islamic
Theocracy and rebuilding the Caliphate. Who could have guessed that it
would take the ham-fisted policies of the Bush administration to
accomplish that goal?

Even more
noteworthy, is the language in the constitution that provides for “vast
autonomous regions” in the oil-rich north and south that will be
controlled by the Kurds and Shiites respectively. That means that the
central oil-poor region will be left to the Sunnis, who will lose
political power accordingly.

Was the United
States behind this strategy to divide Iraq into three parts?

In a word, yes.

Acting viceroy
Zalmay Khalilzad is one of the founding members of the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), and has been actively involved in the
negotiations from the beginning. Khalilzad oversaw the writing of the
Afghanistan constitution which, according to the New York Times,
“declared it an ‘Islamic Republic’ in which no law could contradict
Islam.” Khalilzad has played a similarly supportive role in Iraq and
produced the very same results.

In view of this, it
is absurd to say that the administration is committed to democracy in the
Middle East. Quite the contrary, they are looking to duplicate the Saudi
regime which has served American colonial objectives for over 50 years.

Does the Bush
administration support the division of Iraq, as well?

Of course. It was the US that introduced the
deceptive language of “federalism”, probably conjured up in a right-wing
think tank, to disguise their real intention of breaking the country up
into smaller, more manageable mini-states. The principle of “divide and
conquer” is still the time-honored strategy of imperial powers. There’s
nothing new here.

Two weeks ago, the
Washington Post reported that, “The United States no longer expects
to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society
in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic
challenges.” It was an astonishing admission of failure in all the
original objectives of the war. The constitution moves the US mission in
Iraq from mere disappointment to catastrophe. It is the calculated
partitioning of the country and the destruction of Iraqi society through
civil war. The administration’s plan to break up Iraq will end the
political process, energize the resistance and, ultimately kill more
American soldiers.

Bush is now in a
great position to smash his previous record for “more dead Americans than
days served in office.”